Nucleus-Aware Self-Supervised Pretraining Using Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation for Histopathology Images

作者：Zhiyun Song, Penghui Du, Junpeng Yan, K. Y. Li, Jianzhong Shou, Maode Lai, Yubo Fan, Yan Xu · 发表于：IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.1109/tmi.2023.3309971 · 被引用次数：13 · 研究领域：AI in cancer detection、Digital Imaging for Blood Diseases、Radiomics and Machine Learning in Medical Imaging

Self-supervised pretraining attempts to enhance model performance by obtaining effective features from unlabeled data, and has demonstrated its effectiveness in the field of histopathology images. Despite its success, few works concentrate on the extraction of nucleus-level information, which is essential for pathologic analysis. In this work, we propose a novel nucleus-aware self-supervised pretraining framework for histopathology images. The framework aims to capture the nuclear morphology and distribution information through unpaired image-to-image translation between histopathology images and pseudo mask images. The generation process is modulated by both conditional and stochastic style representations, ensuring the reality and diversity of the generated histopathology images for pretraining. Further, an instance segmentation guided strategy is employed to capture instance-level information. The experiments on 7 datasets show that the proposed pretraining method outperforms supervised ones on Kather classification, multiple instance learning, and 5 dense-prediction tasks with the transfer learning protocol, and yields superior results than other self-supervised approaches on 8 semi-supervised tasks. Our project is publicly available at https://github.com/zhiyuns/UNITPathSSL.